GeForce GTX 480 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

The GeForce GTX 480 makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 700 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 924 MHz on this specific card. It features 480 SPUs along with 60 Texture Address Units and 48 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which comes with clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTX 480 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 6950 2GB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 480	Radeon HD 6950 2GB
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	March 2010	December 2010
Code Name	GF100	Cayman Pro
Fab Process	40 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe x16
Memory	1536 MB	2048 MB
Core Speed	700 MHz	800 MHz
Shader Speed	1401 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	924 MHz	1250 MHz
Unified Shaders	480	1408
Texture Mapping Units	60	88
Render Output Units	48	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	384-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	250 watts	200 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	177408 MB/sec	160000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	42000 Mtexels/sec	70400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	33600 Mpixels/sec	25600 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.